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Amazon looks set to open a data center in Germany, allowing European developers to access Bezos & Co's rentable computer tech with lower latencies.

Evidence first gathered by a manager at a Berlin-based startup and subsequently verified by El Reg indicates that Amazon's next cloud computing data center may be in Frankfurt, Germany. The cloud giant's other European facility is in Ireland.

The new center will give customers in central and Eastern Europe a more responsive lower-latency option when renting AWS resources.

It's also worth noting that Germany has some of the strictest information privacy legislation in Europe, and its citizens, partly due to the troubled history of the country, have a healthy skepticism for anything that looks remotely like mass data gathering by the NSA et al. And, following the revelations by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, there's great concern over who exactly can access their data.

"Keeping data in their own country was most important to German ICT decision-makers (32 per cent of respondents agreeing), followed by the UK (24 per cent) and France (23 per cent)," a recent survey found.

However, given Uncle Sam's determination to delve into data centers operated by American companies – such as Amazon – it is foolish to assume a Germany-based AWS bit barn will be impenetrable to US g-men, whether they have a warrant or not.

Data centers take such a long time to build, though, that Amazon is likely to have been planning the German site, and securing electricity contracts and so on, far in advance of the Snowden revelations.

Amazon has set up the endpoints for all major cloud services in a region named ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com, according to an investigation by Nils Jünemann, veep of operations at Berlin-based startup Bitplaces. Jünemann showed that scanning a block of IP addresses owned by Amazon.com Inc revealed running systems that identified themselves as eu-central-1 servers.

A traceroute performed by him indicated that the new data center will be somewhere near ffm – Frankfurt am Main in Germany.

“We’re constantly getting feedback from customers on where they would like the next Amazon Region and have a long list of target countries we are looking at," a spokesperson for Amazon told The Register in the past hour.

"We're always re-evaluating and reprioritizing that list and Germany is one of the many countries that we are currently looking at. In the fullness of time you can expect Amazon Regions in multiple major countries around the world.” ®